Swedish internet use plummets after filesharing curb introduced

Internet traffic in Sweden - previously a hotbed of illicit filesharing - has fallen dramatically following the introduction of a law banning online piracy.

The country - home to the notorious Pirate Bay website, whose founders are awaiting a court judgment on whether they have broken the law by allowing people to find films, games and music for illicit downloads - has previously been seen as a haven for filesharing, in which people can get copyrighted content for free.

As many as one in 10 Swedes is thought to use such peer-to-peer services.

The so-called IPRED law, which came in to force on Wednesday, obliges internet service providers (ISPs) to turn over details about users who share such content to the owners of copyrighted material, if a court finds sufficient evidence that the user has broken the law.

That seems to have spooked some Swedes. Statistics from the Netnod Internet Exchange, which measures internet traffic, suggest that daily online activity dropped more than 40% after the law took effect. The fall in data may be due to people being worried that their ISP will track their data and they may be sued for copyright infringement, which usually carries penalties equivalent to thousands of pounds.

Filesharing systems such as BitTorrent carry enormous amounts of data over the internet; some estimates have suggested that illicit downloads make up at least half of all traffic passing over the network.

In Sweden the lawyers for a number of publishers of crime novelists including the late Stieg Larsson have brought a lawsuit seeking to identify a person who had stored about 2,000 digitised audiobooks on a server to make them available for free. Audiobooks - which can be very profitable - are comparatively easily copied from CD.

The chair of the Swedish Publishers' Association, Kjell Bohlund, said such filesharing "has hit writers, publishers, and internet book retailers financially, and there is a longer-term risk that publication will decline".

The new Swedish legislation is similar to that being sought by copyright owners such as record labels and film studios for the UK and France.